AUSTIN, TEXAS - Vignette, a leading provider of enterprise content management solutions, announced in a Wednesday press release that it has received three US patents for innovation in content caching, categorization and user tracking.
These technologies, currently embedded within Vignette’s Next Generation Web Presence solution, are designed to help organizations and individuals manage and leverage the persistent growth of unstructured information.
According to a study by the University of California at Berkeley, more than 31 exabytes (one billion gigabytes) of content— unstructured information like documents, emails, records, photos, videos — will be generated in 2009 alone, roughly the equivalent of all the printed information available in 300,000 US Libraries of Congress and more than all of the content produced throughout the entire history of mankind.
“Both large organizations and individuals increasingly consume content in the form of rich media rather than structured data, and the volume of this unstructured information continues to grow without constraint,” said Conleth O’Connell, chief technology officer at Vignette. “In the very near future, I expect we’ll see people carrying more than 1,000 gigabytes of information on a handheld device. It’s unfair to expect someone to scroll through that much content to find the email, document, song or photo they’re looking for. That’s why content management is becoming as important to consumers as it is to enterprise organizations.”
Vignette’s core solutions help customers manage and deliver content over Internet-enabled devices, digitize and automate high volume, document-intensive business processes, and manage the lifecycle of electronic documents and records. The patents reflect Vignette’s conviction that the explosive growth of content requires ongoing investments in content management technologies:
US Patent No. 7,024,452- Vignette’s high-performance caching technology helps reduce performance degradation by Web servers, caused by large volumes of files. Maintaining high performance levels is necessary to allow users to quickly access content delivered via the Web.
US Patent No. 7,028,024- Vignette received a patent for content categorization to manage the associations of content, making operations such as determining related articles easier.
US Patent No. 6,996,612- Vignette’s tracking technology provides users a certain level of privacy when browsing the Web by allowing them to control information being sent to parties not affiliated with the specific site the user is currently browsing.
“Organizations have to walk a fine line to balance privacy policies like HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) or OPPA (Online Privacy Protection Act) against the need for targeted delivery of content based on user desire or behavior,” said Shawn Willett, research director at Current Analysis Inc. “One solution is to enable users to control the level of personal information being sent to third parties, which allows the individual to moderate how deep the targeting can occur.”
